Digest for Wednesday 22 July 2026

All times UTC

• Established

  UK design job postings are still well below 2018 levels

  Indeed Design's data showed UK UX design and research job postings sitting at roughly half of Q1 2018 levels by Q3 2023, after a pandemic-era surge and fall. It's a tighter market than the 2021 boom made it look.

  indeed.design · 1 Nov

• Established

  Nielsen's 10 heuristics are still your fastest critique tool

  Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, first published in 1994, remain the quickest way to sanity-check a screen before user testing. They're not glamorous, but they still catch real problems fast.

  nngroup.com · 1 Jan

• Established

  Design tokens are baseline literacy now, not a nice-to-have

  Design tokens (colour, spacing, radius values defined once and reused everywhere) have moved from 'advanced design systems topic' to expected practice across teams. If you're not naming your values, you're behind the curve.

  designsystems.news · 15 Jan

• Adoption

  Figma's AI features are now core product, not a beta toy

  Figma's product pages now list AI workflows, Figma Make, and Motion as standard parts of the toolkit rather than side experiments. That's a shift from 'try this AI thing' to 'this is how Figma works now'.

  figma.com · 7 May

• Adoption

  AI speeds up grunt work — not your judgement calls

  Autodesk's SIGGRAPH 2024 announcements show AI (Flow Generative Scheduling, Maya's ML Deformer) automating repetitive production tasks like scheduling and rigging. The same pattern is showing up in UI tools: AI handles the boring bits, humans still make the calls.

  adsknews.autodesk.com · 29 Jul

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